The age in which International Law was born was an age of land warsThewars of succession and of feudal ascendancy had partially died outbut theReformation brought with it a new fury of fightingand the wars of religionwere among the most ferocious that mankind had wagedArmies did not thenso much consist of rival potentatesas of hosts in which each individualdetested every man on the generally believed to have culminated in the siegeof MagdeburgThere is a famous passage of Grotius about the licence of fightingwhich he saw around himand though the dates forbid us to see here withsolve writers any allusion to the siege of Magdeburgthere seems littledoubt that the stories of the horrors which became current gave a new pointto the speculations of Grotius and his school.
Until very recent times there is great ground for distrusting the accuracyof the figures which purport to represent the amount of slaughter at battlesand siegesIt is saidhoweverthat the population of Magdeburgwhichwas taken by stormwas reduced from 25,00to 2,700The siege is describedby an English eyewitnesswhose account of itgenerally regarded as authentic,constitutes those 'Memoirs of a Cavalierwhich are generally embodied inthe works of DefoeThe writer states that out of 25,00menand some said30,000there was not after the storm a soul to be seen alive till the flamesdrove those that were hid in vaults and secret places to seek death in thestreets rather than perish in the fireOf these miserable creatures toosome were killed by the fierce soldiersbut at last they saved the livesof such as came out of their cellars and holesand so about 2,00poor desperatecreatures were leftThere was little shootingThe execution was an cuttingof throats and mere house murdersLater historical information tends onthe whole to relieve the memory of Count Tillythe commander of the besiegers,from the infamy which has hitherto attached to itbut all sieges in thatday were to the last degree homicidaland there is a general impressionthat the peculiar ferocity of the soldiery after the capture of a town bystorm was due to the Tartarswho had twice overrun what were then the mostfertile and civilised portions of the worldand who never spared the populationof the town which had resisted themThey appear to have considered thatevery stratagem and every degree of bad faith was justifiable for the purposeof inducing the garrison to surrenderbut in the long run they never sparedany manNor have the countries in which these massacres took place everwholly recovered from themSo farindeedas the centre and west of Europeare concernedthere is visible a calming down of these bitter extremitiesof war as soon as Grotiuswith perhaps a few predecessors and a series ofsuccessorsbegan to writeI have already several times referred to hismethodHe was guidedas it seemsprincipally by what he supposed to beexamples and precedentsHe was a man of great learning according to theparticular standards of learning which prevailed in that daybut the criticaltreatment of history had not begunand the worst of the pile of innumerableexamples which are collected in the 'De Jure Belli et Pacisis that we cannotbe sure of the authenticity of the accounts of them which are found in thebooks of ancient writersGrotius digested these precedentsHe separatedthe most humane from the most ferociousperforming the function of separationby applying to the mass of matter before himfirst of all the test of religiousteaching as he found it in the Scripturesand next the principle of whatthe Romans called the Law of NatureThe method of his immediate successorshas been substantially the samebut in our day some scepticism has arisen,not so much as to the philosophical value of the process as with regard toits practical resultsIn modern international writings you may sometimesfind it said that the softening of the usages of war was not so much dueto Grotiusor to writers who came after himas to the growing humanityof military commandersIt is true that among the successors of Grotius thereis a great variety in the degree of humanity which characterizes themPuffendorfand Bynkershoek are inferior to Vattel in gentlenessand in the wish toprefer the more humane to the queller usagebut beyond comparison the mosthumane of the publicists is Vattela SwissThere ishoweververy goodreason to suppose that it was the writings of the publicists which most encouragedthe humanity of warThey all followed Grotius in professing unbounded respectfor the Roman conception of the Law of NaturePhilosophically that principleis now not much cared forbut the supposed rules of the Law of Nature wereapplied by another set of writers to another subject matterThere was agradual growth all over continental Europe in the eighteenth century of respectand reverenceand even enthusiasmfor humanityand you may perceive thaton the whole the persons who experiencedor pretended to experiencethisfeelingwerebelievers in the Law of NatureThe chief of them was thatfamous man the whole of whose philosophypoliticalsocialand educational,was based on the Law of NatureJean Jacques RousseauIt seems in truth,apart from what the opinion of scholars may have beenthat there was alwaysa close association between the Law of Nature and humanityand that by theirconstant profession of applying that law and of easily distinguishing itsdictates from one another the international writers did materially increasethe gentleness of mankind even when their passions were most excited.
The wars of the last part of the seventeenth and most of the eighteenthcentury were naval warsA great amount of law grew up while they were continuing.
